Photo by Jem Sahagun on Unsplash

Research

Diana Anderson, MD, M.Arch, Receives Bioethics Grant for Improving Long-Term Care Facility Design

Diana Anderson, MD, M.Arch, assistant professor of neurology, has received a one-year, $48,902 Bridging Bioethics Research & Policymaking grant from the Greenwall Foundation for her project “Improving Long-Term Care Facility Design through Bioethical Peer Review.”

Anderson’s past research has shown that the built space of healthcare environments can function as a healthcare intervention, achieving medicine-like effects that can profoundly affect persons living in long-term care (LTC). “However, there is a lack of medical oversight, existing human subject research protections, standards of architectural practice, or other governing protective mechanisms related to the built space of LTC facilities,” she says.

Anderson is a board-certified healthcare architect and geriatrician. As a “dochitect,” (doctor + architect) she combines educational and professional experience in both medicine and architecture. She has worked on hospital design projects globally and is widely published in architectural and medical journals and books. She is a frequent speaker about the impacts of healthcare design on patient outcomes, staff satisfaction and related topics.

Anderson received her bachelor of science in architecture and master of architecture degrees from McGill University in Montreal before pursuing her MD from the University of Toronto. She completed a residency in internal medical at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Columbia University Irving Medical Center and a clinical geriatric fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. She completed an advanced fellowship in geriatric neurology and research at the VA Boston Healthcare System under the guidance of Andrew Budson, MD, professor of neurology at the school.

A past fellow at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics, she continues to explore space design and ethics, especially in the context of nursing homes and institutional living for older adults. Anderson frequently speaks about the impacts of healthcare design on patient outcomes, care delivery and related topics. She is co-founder of the MGB Health Design Lab, uniting clinical, architectural, and design professionals with a mission to advance the collaboration between health care and design across four domains: research; education; clinical practice and innovation; and bioethics and policy.

The Greenwall Foundation seeks to make bioethics integral to decisions in health care, policy, and research. It is a nationally recognized private foundation with assets of about $100 million, awarding approximately $3-4 million annually in support of its mission to expand bioethics knowledge to improve clinical, biomedical, and public health decision-making, policy, and practice.